lrt's friend
Active Member
On a sour note, only 6 trains are running this afternoon. This has become catastrophic. They were contracted to provide 15 trains during peak periods.
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Ottawa Transit Developments
- Thread starter Reecemartin
- Start date
Coolstar
Senior Member
Now that we're at this point, would it have been worth it to delay the LRT from it's September opening to something like a January opening and by then most of bugs would've been fixed?
lrt's friend
Active Member
After a 16 month launch delay, there was enormous pressure from the public to open the line. There were warnings of trouble. The fact that they could not run 15 trains during the test run was a sign. The fact that they had to reset the 12 day trial multiple times, was a warning. There was also warnings during winter testing in February 2019. I don't know if what you suggested would have solved everything, but it appears that the Confederation Line was launched prematurely. The city would have been better off to have run parallel bus service through until April. It is shocking that they sold the surplus buses within days, which has created further problems. The cost of parallel bus service would have been enormous but it would have maintained public confidence as the problems were worked out. The outcome was that a degree of parallel (a poor facsimile of the past service) bus service has been running every day since January. Certainly, many of the problems would not have been solved without public use of the trains. Further testing would have just postponed resolution of these problems. For example, the 3 major transfer stations were all poorly designed and all are being revised. This would have required public use of those stations to determine this.
jayme2016
Active Member
I think REM is going to have the same issues.
jayme2016
Active Member
I know its easy to pick on the shinny new system but whats not getting much attention is the massive issues with buses today alone there were 4 major buses stuck on one road.
lrt's friend
Active Member
articulated buses never perform well in Ottawa snowstorms.
Kyle Campbell
Active Member
I do hear people say "bring back the buses, we need a reliable transit system" but I must have been riding a parallel universe OC Transpo system back then because they were anything but reliable. I kept dreaming of the day the trains would start and I could reliably leave my office and get home. In fact as problem plagued at the trains are I'm generally still almost always beating my old commute time.
However the failures are getting ridiculous. There's no excuse for the catenary to fall down not once but twice, endless flat wheels and half the fleet being constantly out of service. People are saying yank the contract, but I don't see how that helps. Instead we should launch a lawsuit for the 2.1 billion original of the contract, and include SNC Lavalin and Alstom directly in the suit. Neither company needs a massive lawsuit bringing down their stock price right now, and it would get us the highest level of attention.
jayme2016
Active Member
There are issue with the lrt that can be fixed however there are serious issues with the buses that i ma not sure that the city can fix unless we invest billions.
NotAToy
New Member
In my opinion, yes. But the trains have winter issues. Not sure how that would go.
How much would 2.1 Billion CAD get in Europe or Asia?
Add non-winter readiness and poorly designed transfer stations to that list. Why would they knowingly design Blair with a single platform if they know transfers to bus would occur for 6? years? Glitches are normal for a new system, but not on this scale and this far into service.
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smallspy
Senior Member
There was one photo going around showing three stuck buses - and not one of them was articulated.
I think that it may be time for Ottawa to look for a new tire supplier for their buses.
Dan
Kyle Campbell
Active Member
I assume you meant Blair, and it's just the repurposed Local stops of the original Blair station. They didn't want to spend money on reconfiguring that section, other than to tear down the old transitway heated shelters. The whole reuse of Blair's original station is really akward, they should have just torn it down completely and built a new one like they did elsewhere
I would say it's probably easier for the City to just withhold all payments than to try to sue to get money back. Would SNC or Alstom sue OC Transpo because they aren't getting paid? Doubtful, and if they do, good luck with that.
"You're sucking, so we won't be paying you until you get your shit together" would also be a politically popular move.
NotAToy
New Member
That's literally what they're doing. The $30 million monthly maintenance payments are bing withheld until the consortium gets it's act together. Here's hoping Stage 2 won't be a disaster.
Good to know. I had heard some talk about that, but I didn't know if they were withholding the whole payment amount, or just a percentage of it.
jayme2016
Active Member
Some think thy city did not factor in Gatieau or the Ottawa Valley and built the stataions just based on the population of Ottawa.